Many industries employ and/or produce as by-products of various processes materials that require additional processing to place these materials in condition for further handling or disposal. At least certain of these materials may in fact be hazardous to the environment and to living organisms that may come in contact therewith so that these and other materials are often treated in what is commonly termed a thermal destruction reactor wherein very high temperature reactions are carried out to thermally decompose materials and these reactions may occur in oxidizing, inert and/or reducing environments and combinations thereof.
Conventional reactors designed to carry out thermal decomposition reactions are quite large and expensive and furthermore, incorporate limitations as to materials that can be operated upon. In this respect, reference is made to U.S. Pat. No. 3,933,434 to Matovich and following patents of the same inventor. Many of these types of reactors are limited to operation upon materials having a particular physical form and others are useful only for burning trash or the like, but most cannot produce sufficiently complete combustion in order to meet the increasingly stringent regulatory requirements for processing and/or disposal of liquid or gaseous organic materials.
The present invention provides a simple safe process and system operating at sufficiently high temperatures for substantially complete decomposition of organic chemicals and comprises an improvement on the invention of Galloway disclosed and claimed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 760,944, filed 7/31/85 and issued as U.S. Pat. No. 4,688,495 on Aug. 25, 1987, and assigned to the same assignee as the present application.